With the advent of typewriters which are more and more automated due to the advances in magnetic media implementation such as magnetic tape typewriters or magnetic card control typewriters, and due to the advances in electronics, it is becoming more and more desirable to be able to use a typewriter fully, and to ease the typist's burden and the setting and resetting of tabulator stops for different purposes such as letter stops for correspondence and other spaced stops for columnar work such as statistical tables or reports. Heretofore the typist of necessity had to clear all existing tab stops and then reset the desired tab stops for the next typing assignment. Upon the completion of that assignment if the succeeding assignment required reversion to the original set of tab stops, then the existing stops had to be cleared and the original stops reset.
This consumed time and some typists attempt to avert this necessity by setting a combined set of tab stops and then attempting to ignore the ones not desired for that particular job. This approach tends to create the opportunity for errors in tabulation.